It would turn out to be
Mme. Sauton's son discharged from the army, or the Abbe Perdreau's niece
come home from her convent, or the Cure's brother, a tax-collector at
Chateaudun, who had just retired on a pension or had come over to Combray
for the holidays. On first noticing them you have been impressed by the
thought that there might be in Combray people whom you 'didn't know at
all,' simply because, you had failed to recognise or identify them at
once. And yet long beforehand Mme. Sauton and the Cure had given warning
that they expected their 'strangers.' In the evening, when I came in and
went upstairs to tell my aunt the incidents of our walk, if I was rash
enough to say to her that we had passed, near the Pont-Vieux, a man whom
my grandfather didn't know:
"A man grandfather didn't know at all!" she would exclaim. "That's a
likely story." None the less, she would be a little disturbed by the news,
she would wish to have the details correctly, and so my grandfather would
be summoned. "Who can it have been that you passed near the Pont-Vieux,
uncle? A man you didn't know at all?"
"Why, of course I did," my grandfather would answer; "it was Prosper, Mme.
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